


a form of energy, such as heat

by propast



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Gen, Post-Final Fantasy VIII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:08:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29758035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propast/pseuds/propast
Summary: Power neither begins nor ends.
Kudos: 1





	a form of energy, such as heat

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the 2021 Final Fantasy Kiss Battle. Kisses have since been removed and left on the cutting room floor, replaced by word soup and magical meta.

Edea keeps a garden. It’s hard growing anything on Centra’s clay, she claims mildly, without a touch of magic. Not a garden of flowers, though; she grows vegetables and cocoa, wheat and onions and hops that can be fermented. 

Rinoa, who had pictured sunflowers as tall as she was, or azaleas dyed deep blue, can’t quite hide her disappointment. 

She’s clumsy with growth, too. It should come naturally to her, a new Sorceress, but it doesn’t. 

“A drop of magic, nothing more,” Edea instructs. 

Rinoa can’t finesse a drop; it tumbles from her hands and her soul, a too-strong wave breaking on rocks. The air crackles with static electricity and mana. The stalks of the infant crops stand too straight in their shock. They’re lucky it doesn’t attract monsters. 

Ellone helps. Rinoa can’t help but regard her with a mix of curiosity and envy, wondering about the woman who manages to be _special_ and _other_ even among Sorceresses and wishing that she had grown up as Ellone had: in the company of Squall and the rest. Ellone blows gently on the soil and sends the crops hurtling through their lifespan, blossoming from seeds to shoots in a matter of seconds.

Rinoa merely watches, perched atop the short stone walls, sometimes with a book or a draft of a letter or a sketchpad in her lap. She doesn’t touch the vegetables, even though Edea and Ellone are both too kind to tell her not to. She gets it. 

One day, weeks into their retreat, she wakes up and the room is filled with uncommonly blue azaleas, peeking out from the slits of dirt between the stone floor. The three do their best to move them to pots, safe and rich soil, but they don’t survive the transition. Death - when it comes - is brutal and unflinching, petals baking and crumbling in the mid-morning light, stalks shriveling to a dirt brown. 

Rinoa, who doesn’t want to be the type of Sorceress who commands life and death simply because she’s bored, says as much to Edea over tea. 

Edea asks, “Why do you think Ultimecia abandoned me for you?”

She continues, explaining - _power_. Edea had merely cultivated it; Rinoa was fit to the seams with it, every crevice between bone and sinew hiding impossible volumes. To hear her say it, Ultimecia abandoned a puddle for the ocean. She needed a machete, not a butterknife, to hack at her foes. And Rinoa was - 

“I don’t - ” Rinoa starts to say, and then, “ - do you think they should have locked me away?”

Edea’s answer is gentle and honest. “I don’t know, dear. I wondered quite the same, before you came along.”

“So…” Rinoa traces the shapes painted in her teacup, blue swirls that seem to dance under her touch. “I kind of saved you.” 

It’s important, even if she couches it in terms of childish whimsy. She’s more than just a witch of death. She holds onto the power because she can, because that means no one else would have to.  


  


* * *

  


  
Ultimecia keeps a garden. It’s impossible to grow anything on the backs of the dead SeeDs that litter the ground below her castle, she thinks angrily, not without fresh blood to ripen the stone. Not flowers, nor crops. She grows life in frames, a whole world safe and still in gold-touched frames inlaid with pearl and memory. She grows masked sphinxes and giants with armor for flesh, crystal that sings for death and the specters in snail shells. 

Time expels her before she can assert her dominance over it. It happens at the point of a gunblade, like she - someone - had dreamed of once. 

She thinks, _finally_. 

But - time, as finicky and precise and arbitrary as it is, can cull her body and dry her ichor, it can’t eradicate her magic. It becomes its own plane of existence, creates its own gravitational pull, pulses with an impossible heartbeat. 

It - it needs a home. Without one, it will only continue to carry her sagging, dying body along, condemned to continue. 

She can’t stand that. 

There’s brightness in the back of her mind - _home, there_ \- but she isn’t strong enough to find it. 

She surrenders herself to the woman in black instead.  


  


* * *

  


  
Sometimes, Rinoa is feverish; claiming it’s because she isn’t used to the salt in the air, the low altitude of the continent. Ellone, who is used to caring for others, is deftly attentive, bringing her cool water and making sure the windows are open. 

They sleep in the same bed. The orphanage bunks are too small for them. 

Ellone never complains, even when Rinoa hogs the blankets or spreads out too far. It’s fine. She’s slept in worse places, on the floor of research labs or against the cold wall of a ship that would not move again until spring’s thaw. 

Ellone is alive because Rinoa fought for her, despite not knowing her. She knows this. And - when someone saves you, you say thank you. 

She never lacked for love (and still doesn’t), but there were days when she did not know where her next meal would come from, or if there would be a roof over her head. Rinoa, by contrast, has had too many homes - a train car, a mansion, an academy - but wears her heart on a sleeve in a desperate bid to give it away to the first person who might want it. The younger woman will never accept pity, so Ellone doesn’t feel any. She simply keeps the windows open on hot nights, surrenders most of the blankets, and listens. 

Rinoa, burning like a furnace, ends up in her arms most nights. 

She brushes some hair out of Rinoa’s face, feeling her sleeping skin, the veins bulging faint at her temple. 

Ellone is alive because Rinoa accepted a garden of masked sphinxes and giants with armor for flesh into herself and tucked them into the back of her mind, where they risk growing and growing and growing until - until only the magic, and not the will or the life, clots the girl’s skin together still.  


  


* * *

  


  
Edea understands the moment the fever leaves her. Thoughts, cool and composed and utterly her own, take precedence in her own body once more. Her joints feel weakened, barely able to hold herself up (too much weight around her neck, at her eyes - _where is she_?); she’s a puppet, strings cut, having to learn to stand on toyish feet. 

She remembers very little. A flash of white, the glow of firelight bouncing off twisting shapes and black-lit body paint - a bullet whistling through the air, a perfect shot right between the eyes - 

_well done, child, but_ \- 

A girl she’s never met before; a perpetual spot of light in her peripheral vision, bright enough to burn if gazed at directly. 

A new horror smashes its way in. Edea refuses to give it succor, forcing herself to think. 

What of the children? What about Ellone?

Forcing her croaking voice to life, she drags herself up on the podium. Trembling fingers barely hold her upright as she asks, demands - _have I protected them_?  


  


* * *

  


  
When Rinoa returns to Balamb Garden, she asks Squall to draw Eden from her. 

She’s never really figured out how to safely unjunction; there hadn’t been time, at first, and then she’d just forgotten to ask for a demonstration. 

He does it, of course. He’s not in the habit of denying her. Something in her breastbone leaps, panicking, when he absorbs Eden and his shoulders jerk back just so. Her mind empties of static and grids, and instead of remembering the heat death of the universe she remembers the first time Squall bought her coffee, messing up her order spectacularly and then scowling when she teased him for it. 

She shakes her head and forces herself to focus on the present. 

“Squall, are you okay?”

He unjunctions Eden deftly, cradling its essence in his hands. A blue flame, quickly hardening into a smooth stone, which he slips into his pocket. 

“Fine.” A short, disaffected wave of his hand to punctuate. “Sorry, I forgot you still had it.” 

“He - it - helped me a lot.” She smiles. “But we’re not fighting anymore, and - actually, that’s funny.”

He frowns. “What is?” 

“I was just a civilian you were supposed to protect. I mean, I was a Sorceress too, but that came later. But you showed me how to junction and gave me access to SeeD-grade guardian forces.” 

Was that the beginning of the end? Eden was a bolt of lightning she felt down to her knees, like having the electrical grid of the entire continent distilled into a single taut wire through her bloodstream. It had plucked out memories of her childhood in order to make a nest for itself in the back of her mind. Quistis had been disapproving, arguing with Squall when she thought Rinoa couldn’t hear, telling him that she was too small and weak, too untrained to endure Eden’s will. 

Rinoa endured without complaining, desperate to prove herself. Until now. Maybe Quistis was right all along. 

But now she’s a Sorceress, and she doesn’t need Eden.  


  


* * *

  


  
Rinoa rebuilds her memories through sketches. The book that had started out as an idle hobby to keep her hands busy is now a permanent fixture in her grip, fingers perpetually smudged with charcoal and graphite. 

Julia’s face is harder to picture. Rinoa imagines her in a purple dress, with wings. 

Her father - Fury, that was his name right? - is fierce and thunderous. He guards her. He tries to keep the whole world out. She draws him in charcoal grey and bright red, remembering the colours of his military badges and the curved horns protruding from his forehead. 

Zell draws his shoulders back and fire climbs down his arms before he strikes the ground. That fire could consume him and become his armor.

Selphie is all the colours, bright and lovely, face painted. Like a festival. 

Irvine, well - he’s large and jerky, right? Something flares out behind him. A coat? A tail? He’s up in the air, shooting down from below, right between the eyes. 

Angelo’s fur is gold, she tells herself, and her eyes are - yes, black. How many eyes should Rinoa draw her with? She goes with six, because she can’t remember any reason why not. 

Quistis is cold and brittle, older and too certain - filled with condemnations and apologies alike - and she’s encased in it, right? You need to prove yourself to Quistis. You need to show her you can do it. She doesn’t accept things by halves. 

Seifer - oh. He’s skeletal, malnourished, dehydrated and dyed green, stuck in the ground. She wants anything else for him. She wants to see his face and hands and remember. Squall is drawn and erased and - and drawn again and erased again. 

No matter what, he has to stay by her side.  


  


* * *

  


  
Rinoa keeps a garden. It’s too hot to grow anything, everyone tells her - voices coming from this way, that way, nowhere and everywhere - but she brings oil and canvas to the barren, parched world under her feet. Headstones litter the dead soil and she counts them every night, her eyes red and clear and waterless. 

She’ll have to wait a little longer for the heat to subside.


End file.
